When you are taking care of others, what function-attitude do you tend to use the most? Where is it in your typology? Have there been times when it has not been effective? Why? How do you, yourself prefer to be taken care of? How does that differ from how you do it for others?
Editors Carol Shumate, Ph.D., ENFP, and Mark Hunziker, INTJ, founded Personality Type in Depth as a forum to bridge psychological type and depth psychology. Both editors are themselves writers and they work together virtually, from North Carolina and Vermont respectively. Shumate's career has been in journalism, publishing, and higher education, while Hunziker's has been primarily in organization development consulting. Shumate's current project is a book on the Trickster archetype in leadership, and Hunziker's is about depth typology, a term he has coined for the interface of the two fields.
Do you agree with Jungian analyst John Giannini, and others, that ESTJ is “the dominant typology of western culture?” Do you think this may be changing? Do you see major, typologically distinct subcultures? What do you see as the dominant typology of other cultures or countries?
Both articles in this issue discuss type distortion and the legacy of a prevailing cultural typology—one within a family and the other, on a national scale. Have you personally experienced or witnessed type falsification? What do you think caused it? Did your family, hometown, or nationality have a cultural type? How did this type legacy affect you and others?
Type as a problem needs to be rediscovered. Although from Jung’s point of view moderate one-sidedness does not usually cause major difficulties and is a stage of development to go through, ultimately being a type is a problem whereas contemporary type theory generally views it as a virtue. This has resulted in the transcendent function being overlooked.
Jung observed that, “The developing personality obeys … only brute necessity; it needs the motivation force of inner and outer fatalities.” Are “outer fatalities” a requisite for growth? Are “inner fatalities” necessarily traumatic and potentially catastrophic? Are there gentler, more positive ways of facilitating development of personality?
Academic personality research likes to consider trait psychology to be the scientific revolution that overtook and replaced Jung’s type psychology. However, it may be more accurate to view type and trait models as complementary because the conceptual divide has been shifting, and many trends in academic personality research now reflect the fundamental principles of Jung’s type system.
Is differentiation of an ego-syntonic function-attitude somehow different from differentiation of an ego-dystonic FA? Or maybe differentiation works the same for all function-attitudes and it’s just in the subsequent integration process that the distinction between ego-syntonic and ego-dystonic comes into play. Do we need a more refined understanding of typological development?
Our often-used shorthand illustration with a line drawn between the four allegedly conscious function-attitudes and the four “unconscious” ones is misleading because consciousness is not a sufficiently reliable characteristic for distinguishing these two sides of the psyche’s typology. It’s related to what distinguishes them, but only as a secondary and fairly unpredictable characteristic.
A separation exists between psychology and typology. Many psychologists and even many Jungians ignore Jung’s major work, Psychological Types, and the concepts underlying it. The field has been left mostly to lay practitioners, who use the MBTI® instrument for training, coaching, and other pragmatic applications. What reasons do you see for the divide?
I allowed myself to take a little vacation from my single-mindedness and felt a shift in attitude and awareness almost immediately. My linear, tunnel-vision mindset relaxed, and I began to notice and embrace information, insights, and opportunities that came along unexpectedly and felt important despite having no logical connection with the task at hand.
To have to spend a year in one’s inferior function is like a yearlong time-out for a toddler. I got so bored and desperate with my inferior introverted sensing (Si) function, required to gather and document the data, that I spent many hours asleep in the library. I could have asked Dr. Goldsmith for help, or maybe a mercy killing, but I was too proud to admit difficulty.
She could not compete with me in the extraverted thinking mode that I (and our culture) insisted upon, so my well-meant out-reaching felt like attacks to her, and my peace offering of objective discussion was like a Viking’s looming battle-axe. Rather than take part in a Te confrontation that she couldn’t win, she had changed the rules, initiating an introverted feeling battle of attrition.
“Ambiversion” —the equal development of extraversion and introversion in an individual— has become a popular notion of late but it has led to some misinterpretations of Jung’s typology, specifically, to an idealization of this in-between state…
Is it INTJ or INTP? Sometimes the MBTI code’s judging/perceiving (J/P) dichotomy is extremely difficult to nail down—showing a low preference clarity on the report and proving elusive to verify. INTJ vs. INTP seems especially problematic. Why is J/P so difficult? Do you have any tips for verification?
In Douglass Wilde’s article about his method of calculating the function-attitudes from MBTI® scores, he adds his voice to the persistent minority who challenge the conventional wisdom about the sequence of function-attitude preferences. … By downloading the Wilde Worksheet for Computing Function-Attitudes, you can test these formulations for yourself.
Jung considered all of the types that the MBTI® code identifies as I—J to be Perceiving types, and all I—Ps to be Judging types, because his use of the terms focuses on the dominant. Myers, however, focused on the extraverted function. So, are I—Js really ‘organized, scheduled, and decisive’ and I—Ps ‘spontaneous, casual, and flexible?’